C.D. Howe

Clarence Decatur Howe (15 January 1886-31 December 1960) was a powerful Liberal Party of Canada politician who served as the MP for Port Arthur from 1935 to 1957, preceding Douglas M. Fisher.

Biography
Clarence Decatur Howe was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on 15 Janaury 1886, and he obtained an engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before arriving in Canada in 1908. His successful business in grain elevators was destroyed by the Great Depression. He entered Parliament for the Liberal Party of Canada in 1935, and became Minister of Transport under William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1936, becoming partially responsible for the creation of Trans-Canada-Airlines (later Air Canada). As Minister of Munitions and Supply he successfully directed Canada's wartime economy. From 1944 he organized its transition to a peacetime economy and, as Minister for Trade and Commerce from 1948 to 1957, he continued to oversee the prosperity of the Canadian economy. In 1956, he supported the trans-Canada pipeline, with public money to be given to a private company; the necessary bill caused a parliamentary storm, and Howe's short-tempered responses to criticism of the pipeline led in part to the defeat of the Louis St. Laurent government in 1957. He died in 1960.